


The Stories We Tell Ourselves

by eluna



Series: When We Were Young [4]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Codependent Winchesters (Supernatural), Emotional Hurt, Emotionally Hurt Dean Winchester, Emotionally Hurt Sam Winchester, Emotionally Repressed Winchesters (Supernatural), M/M, POV Sam Winchester, Pre-Season/Series 01, Stanford Era, Stanford Student Sam Winchester, Unhealthy Relationships, Writer Sam Winchester
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-28
Updated: 2018-10-28
Packaged: 2019-08-08 22:46:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16438283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eluna/pseuds/eluna
Summary: He shakes his head to clear it. Sam invariably always starts thinking about his childhood when Dean comes around and makes it hard for Sam to remember that that isn’t his life anymore. This, Stanford, is what’s real. Dean is just…(a joke, a dream)Dean is what’s play-pretend, Sam’s mind whispers, not the life he chose for himself here at Stanford. He just wonders how long they’ve got together before the charade falls apart.





	The Stories We Tell Ourselves

**Author's Note:**

> New readers: everything in this one-shot should make sense without having read the rest of the series, but if you enjoy this, I recommend that you check out the prequels!
> 
> Two small changes I've made: the oregano incident now takes place when Sam is 19-almost-20, not 18 (let's just chalk it up to Sam's faulty memory in Season 11 when he mentions how old he was), and the graphic novel _Fun Home_ by Alison Bechdel is referenced here in 2003 although in reality it was published in 2006.
> 
> We have two short (very short) timestamps left, and then this series will be complete! I'll get those up right away.

_Palo Alto, April 2003_

The shaggy fibers of the carpet feel funny on Sam’s bare arms: scruffy and pinching, like the stubble his brother gets a few days into a job whenever he’s hunting off the grid. When Dean was first starting to grow facial hair as a teenager, he used to dart into Sam’s space, rub his jaw all along Sam’s forehead and cheeks until Sam shrieked in annoyance and diverted Dean’s energy into a quick but brutal wrestling match. Now, sprawled amidst the beer stains and crumpled cups on the ground floor of whichever fraternity is hosting tonight’s party, Sam windmills his arms against the drag of the carpet and giggles, spluttering when he gasps for air and inadvertently sucks in a lungful of smoke from the joint dangling between his lips.

Plucking it between his thumb and two fingers, Sam watches the wisps of smoke trail from the end of it for a few long moments, his eyes unfocused, before letting his arm topple back to the floor and flicking the joint forward toward the nearest overturned plastic cup. It misses its mark by inches, and he snorts. Honestly, he doubts whether the thing Jolene from his literary theory class gave him to puff on contains any actual marijuana—it doesn’t have the skunk smell he’s come to recognize emanating from Brady every time he stumbles into their room later than midnight, and he doesn’t feel much different twenty minutes in—but chasing down a double helping of cold medicine with tequila shots seems to have been an excellent idea. Sam didn’t even drink beer before college, but he’s feeling loose and sloppy and like he should do this more often. He wouldn’t have given Dean so much grief for adopting their dad’s alcohol habit if he’d realized how it just changes the channel away from all the monsters in his head.

Sam grins at the popcorn ceiling overhead and rolls onto his belly with effort to nuzzle his face into the burnt-orange shag. It smells like horse piss, or maybe just beer, or maybe it’s just that beer and horse piss smell the same. They certainly taste the same, as far as Sam’s concerned. He snorts and then spends the next few minutes wriggling out of his last remaining shirt, blowing his nose thickly into the sleeve as he finally wrenches it off, inside-out and stinking of sweat.

When he’d left, he’d finally almost caught up in height to Dean, who’d taken to wearing Sam’s clothes as often as his own on the grounds that they were all hand-me-downs from him anyway. Dean would steal from Sam’s duffel so often that everything they wore got hopelessly mixed up between them, and Sam had left for California with a bag full of more of Dean’s stuff than his own, all of it unwashed and smelling like a comforting blend of Sam-and-Dean that gradually blurred into the scent of Sam alone the more he wears them. He sniffs absently at the armpit, then the bottom hem, of the one in his hands, chasing after his brother and frowning when he can’t find him—not that he could, almost two years later. He smashes his cheek into the carpet and rubs hard.

And then a big, blurry, impossible somebody is crouching next to his shoulder and muttering, “Damn, Sammy, I know college is a time for finding yourself, but this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind for you when you said you were going to a public Ivy on scholarship.”

Something tingly and bubbly sears through Sam’s body, and he pushes up onto his elbows, fishing through the shag for the discarded joint. He lifts it to his nose and sniffs: still, presumably, just oregano, like the hipster kids seem to be sticking to these days. But that’s not possible, because Dean— _here_ —isn’t possible, at least not without the help of illicit substances. Tylenol and shots alone wouldn’t bring on hallucinations, so it’s got to be pot. Right?

“Sammy? Talk to me.”

“Only my brother calls me that,” says Sam. The words slur together, coming with more difficulty than he’d expected. “Go away.”

Impossible-boy’s smile doesn’t reach far or last long. “I missed you, too, thanks, Sammy.”

Sam’s eyebrows furrow without his permission. “You’re just the drugs talking. Don’t come back until you’re really my brother.”

He smirks, a hollow thing. “Weed doesn’t give you hallucinations. God, are they teaching you _anything_ in those geek classes you’re taking?”

Sam flings out an arm that collides with a very solid, very ripped abdomen. Sam’s fingers clasp three layers of shirts, and he uses the leverage to drag himself up to eye level. “Dean?”

“Right here, buddy,” says Dean in a strangled voice.

He hurtles into Dean’s body, face landing in the crook of his neck, and breathes as deeply as he can.

“Your roommate said I might find you here,” says Dean conversationally, even as he clutches Sam to him, a hand curling in his hair and another rubbing his naked back in circles. Sam shivers, gooseflesh rising at the skin contact. “Put your clothes back on, man; I’m not into exhibitionism.”

Choking a little, Sam grapples with his flannel overshirt until Dean takes pity and does up the buttons for him, leaving one undone by the collar. He stashes the snot-stained T-shirt under one arm. Dean’s looking entirely out of place with a thick layer of ash coating his skin and blood drying on one ripped sleeve of his Henley, and something in Sam’s stomach boils over.

“It was just a poltergeist,” Dean says, standing and helping Sam do the same. “The case was only a few hours north of here. I just thought I would stop in and…”

“It’s good,” says Sam hoarsely, wobbling a little.

Dean holds both hands out to steady him, then shoulders up underneath Sam’s armpit. “Just lean on me, kiddo. Let’s get you home.”

It takes a few minutes to say goodbye to Jolene and company, who take some convincing before they feel safe letting Sam leave in his condition with an apparent stranger. After Sam’s fourth slurred assurance that Dean can be trusted is met with raised eyebrows, Dean digs through a wallet full of fake IDs before unearthing his real one, smarming, “I’ve been looking after my baby bro here since he was in diapers; I think I can handle getting him home. Tell you what: I’ll have him call once we make it to his dorm room to let y’all know we made it back.”

Girls adequately appeased, Dean shoulders most of Sam’s weight as they push past the throngs of loose bodies and away from the sound of a throbbing bass line. “That’s quite a pack of hot girlfriends you had back there, Sammy. Makin’ plenty of friends, huh?”

“I guess,” he concedes softly. It’s hard to think of any of the people he’s met at Stanford as _friends_ , not when there are so few honest things he’s free to say about himself, but people seem to like Sam well enough here, where he’s out of the long shadows Dean and Dad always cast, sticking around long enough to put down roots. And yet Sam still feels like the nomad he’s been trained to become: he keeps waiting for some spirit or witch or demon to show up on campus or, god forbid, go after Dean or Caleb or Pastor Jim and wrench Sam away from his little pipe dream; he hasn’t bothered to decorate his dorm, join any student orgs, go on a single date.

But Sam can’t allow Dean to find any of that out, not when Sam’s given up so much to make it here.

Even with Dean propping him up like this, Sam manages to lose his balance once every few minutes, tripping over his too-small shoes. Dean just chuckles low in his throat, gripping him close, and Sam gulps in the scent of stale breath and sweat, arches into the flex of his fingers.

Dean is here. _Dean_ is here. He feels like Dean’s visits are getting further and further apart; although Dean does call every few weeks, Sam hasn’t _seen_ him since Christmas break, when Dean showed up after his last final to surprise him with a week together, and it’s almost the end of spring semester. More than that, Sam feels like with the passage of time his memory of Dean is becoming more and more immaterial, more mythical, even. Like Dean is a fairytale Sam fantasizes about coming to sweep him up out of his play-pretend life here at Stanford, making the actual sight of him unbelievable—a joke, a dream.

Sam doesn’t expect Dean to remember where Sam lives, but he should have known better: Dean punches in the right door code and everything before helping lug Sam up three flights of steps to his floor in the dorms. He gives Dean his room key rather than try to fumble with the lock himself; while Sam calls Jolene to let her know he’s made it back, Dean strips off his bloody shirt and gives himself a cursory bath over the bathroom sink.

While he’s waiting for Dean to come back into the room, Sam changes sluggishly into pajamas and allows himself to wonder. Dean’s always so finicky about it; will he let them—will tonight be—?

When Dean comes out of the bathroom, he strides right up to Sam’s bed and hops inside, crowding Sam up against the wall to make room for the both of them in Sam’s tiny twin bed. Sam shivers against Dean’s bare torso. “No shirt?”

“Clothes are in my duffel in the Impala. I’ll grab it tomorrow morning after breakfast.”

Sam nods and squirms around trying to get comfortable, waiting, waiting—and then Dean chuckles gently and angles Sam’s chin up for a kiss.

Here it is, this thing they’ve been doing on and off ever since Sam was fourteen and Dean had just tracked down where he’d run away to Flagstaff. The inside of Dean’s mouth tastes just as sweet and sour as Sam remembers it from last Christmas, when Brady was at home with his folks and Sam and Dean spent the break holed up in Sam’s room, having sex on just about every surface in here. Sam never really knows where he stands with Dean—it’s always Dean who dictates whether or not they’re doing anything physical, and it feels so hot-and-cold to be caught in Dean’s web, one visit not touching at all and the next curling up to sleep together after marathon sex every night. Not that they were having marathon sex as kids: the first time didn’t happen until the night Sam was leaving for Stanford, trapped beneath Dean’s body in the Impala outside the ramshackle house they were renting, right where Dad could come outside and find them any second.

Sam tries clumsily to reach for Dean’s belt buckle, but Dean grabs his hands and stills them. “Not while you’re high on drugs, college boy.”

“It’s just acetaminophen and tequila,” Sam slurs. “The joint was probably just oregano.”

“Shut up and get over here,” says Dean, and Sam gladly obliges.

The bed can barely fit Sam, let alone the both of them, but Sam doesn’t mind: it’s an excuse to scooch down so his feet are hanging off the mattress and curl up underneath Dean’s chin, where Dean will pet his hair and rub his back and shush him until he finally falls asleep. It takes a long time, there in the dark, with Dean’s heartbeat lulling him slowly under to sleep, because Sam wants to be awake to remember every second of this in the months he’s sure will intervene between now and Dean’s next visit.

In the morning, Brady looks at them funny but doesn’t say anything about their sleeping arrangements. Sam uses one of his guest passes to get Dean into the dining hall, where Sam watches Dean load up on as many pancakes, eggs, and bacon strips as his tray can possibly handle. He shakes his head at Dean and smiles, not wanting to reveal that his thoughts have jumped to all the times as kids that Dean went without when there wasn’t enough to eat.

Sam can’t stop himself from watching the way Dean wolfs down his breakfast, wondering whether Dean’s eating so much so fast because he’s developed a healthier appetite as an adult or because he hasn’t had enough to eat recently. Dean keeps shooting him looks like _what’s your deal?_ but Sam just shrugs and picks at his sausage links.

Dean or no Dean, finals _are_ coming up, and Sam tells his brother as they’re walking back to Sam’s dormitory that he’s going to have to spend some time working on a story for his fiction writing final. “What’s it about?” Dean asks, scrubbing Sam’s hair playfully and using his other arm to link elbows.

“Oh, nothing,” says Sam, and something about his voice must tell Dean not to push, because he doesn’t ask for details.

In truth, he’s rewriting the story that he first wrote way back at Truman High about killing a werewolf with Dean and Dad the summer of ’97. That hunt was the first thing they did after Dad came to Sam’s motel in Flagstaff to get them and beat Dean to a pulp. Sam still remembers the way he felt in the weeks afterward: loathing Dad and livid on Dean’s behalf, even as he was still floating from the way Dean swept him up and kissed him when he first came to retrieve him. Dad had done some fucked up shit but had never _hurt_ either one of them like that before Flagstaff, and the whole time they were hunting that werewolf, Sam was entertaining florid fantasies of growing up and running away to college with Dean where Dad wouldn’t ever interfere.

He got half his wish: he hasn’t heard from his father since the night Sam revealed his plans for Stanford. But Dean didn’t come with him, even though Sam begged him to in that car with his brother’s hands stroking sweetly over his—

“Earth to Sam.”

They’ve reached the dormitory. “Oh, right,” says Sam, and he pivots and walks toward the door, following Dean inside.

As he writes, half his mind is on the story, and the other half is on Truman, where he was the last time he wrote about this hunt. He left out a lot of the story as a kid—all of the incest, for one thing, and Dad’s brutalization of Dean—but Sam’s come to learn that he feels better when he writes down the mess in his head, less like there’s an entire universe trapped in a mind that he’s slowly losing.

That’s not to say that all of Sam’s stories come directly from personal experience. He generally bastardizes enough of the characterizations and details of the hunts so that no one but maybe Dean or Dad could trace the stories back to Sam, if they read them. Best to be safe, especially since he’s been submitting his works for publication in literary journals for a long time now, and has had more than he would have expected accepted.

Now that he thinks about it, Truman was the last place Dean went before he dropped out of high school. The next city they moved to had an alternative school with GED classes that Dean opted to take in lieu of more traditional coursework. Sam’s never understood why Dean chose that moment to drop out, when he had already elected to repeat his senior year and everything in order to try and graduate.

He shakes his head to clear it. Sam invariably always starts thinking about his childhood when Dean comes around and makes it hard for Sam to remember that that isn’t his life anymore. This, Stanford, is what’s real. Dean is just…

( _a joke, a dream_ )

Dean is what’s play-pretend, Sam’s mind whispers, not the life he chose for himself here at Stanford. He just wonders how long they’ve got together before the charade falls apart.

When Sam calls it quits for the morning, they wind up getting a motel room near campus to get some privacy from Brady. Sam has enough savings from his job at the dining hall to pay for it, but Dean insists on covering the cost by himself. Sometimes Sam thinks that neither of them will ever stop worrying about the other’s finances, even now that they’re adults and can take steps to ensure that they never wind up the way Dad left them too many times as kids.

Sam feels like he can breathe again when Dean pins him down to the king mattress and takes his dick in his hand. Even now that Sam and Dean have started messing around physically, Sam feels like he needs Dean more than Dean needs him: they never talk about it, and Dean lets them be intimate less and less often as the years pass; it’s been that way since even before Sam left home. There are times Sam is glad Dean is drifting further and further away from him, glad not to have Dean distracting him so much from the life he chose for himself at Stanford—and then there are other times when Sam feels like the absence of _enough Dean_ in his life is suffocating him, times when Sam _remembers_ how Dean used to unconditionally be there for him and he feels like he’s starving without _that_ brother, who never left even when Sam was a weeping mess pushing all Dean’s boundaries. Sometimes, Sam thinks that everything he loves about Dean boils down to that last month or two they spent the last time they were in Sioux Falls, when Sam was a wreck all over Dean and yet Dean still stayed through everything Sam put him through.

Sam’s favorite moments are the ones just after orgasm when everything feels hazy and warm and safe. He windmills his limbs around Dean, fidgeting, looking for an angle that doesn’t cut off their breathing. “Kiss me,” he mumbles, and Dean does, a thorough, searching thing.

Sam breathes in his brother’s scent and smiles. “Hey,” he says on a whim, “I was thinking about that town in Oklahoma where we went to Truman High?”

“Yeah,” says Dean, but his voice suddenly sounds guarded and tense.

“Why did you drop out after we left? You’d been working so hard trying to get your diploma, and it seemed like you just suddenly stopped caring.”

Dean pauses for a long moment and then shrugs one shoulder tersely. “It was almost the end of the semester, I was failing half my classes, and we were about to switch schools to someplace with midterm exams with brand new material I wouldn’t be able to pass. When the next town over had GED classes for high school students, it seemed like the better option. There wasn’t anything left for me in high school to stay for.”

“Nothing?” says Sam. Dean’s words make sense, but Sam still has a sick little feeling in his chest at hearing them. Even though he’d been disappointed when Dean was held back a year, Sam had loved going to the same school as Dean for the three schools he got to do so as a freshman before Dean dropped out—loved passing him in the hallways and exchanging secret smiles, like they knew something nobody else did.

Dean just kisses him on the forehead, pushing Sam’s sweaty bangs out of his eyes. “Why are you bringing up ancient history, anyway?” Sam blinks up at him, pouting. “Take a nap, Sammy, you doofus.”

“And you’ll still be here when I wake up?”

“Right. I ain’t going anywhere,” Dean tells him, and Sam allows his eyes to drift shut.

Having Dean here at Stanford is kind of like it was having Dean go to the same school as him, except better, because Dean sits in on all Sam’s classes. “I came here to spend time with you, didn’t I?” he had said defensively the first time he did it, and that was that.

Sam’s first class on Monday morning is a survey of early British literature. His second is literary theory, a twenty-person seminar that meets for an hour and a half in the basement of the furthest damn building on campus from his dorm. He feels his eyes starting to glaze over fifteen minutes in, but he pinches his wrist and steels himself: he’s not fourteen years old anymore; he’s at _Stanford_ , not at Clear Lake Middle School with Allegra Solaire there to tutor him in everything he zoned out of.

Sometimes it amazes Sam that he’s able to stay focused and engage with things by sheer willpower these days. He still lives largely in his mind instead of his environment, but it’s gotten easier to keep himself tuned into his surroundings now that he and Dean aren’t on the outs anymore.

Why is he thinking so much the last couple days about the worst year of his life? He zeroes back in on the class right as he realizes that Dean is raising his hand.

Oh, this should be interesting. It’s always fun to watch Dean play devil’s advocate against Sam’s professors, although it always surprises Sam how _smart_ Dean’s retorts are, given that Dean’s prior knowledge of academia is limited to whatever he was able to glean before dropping out of high school.

Dr. Louden spots Dean’s hand in the air just as she’s saying, “Here, _Fun Home_ offers us an excellent example of—yes?”

“Wait, wait, wait, so,” Dean starts, blasting full charisma in his smirk, and Sam muffles his snicker in his sweatshirt sleeve. “You’re telling me this chick—”

“ _Bechdel_ ,” says Louden, raising her eyebrows.

“You’re telling me that Bechdel saw this snake in a river with her dad as a kid, and she pulls from the lore to say that serpents have been used as a symbol of ambiguity and dual masculinity and femininity—and because her father was gay, the fact that she saw this snake with him somehow _proves_ that gender _is_ nonbinary, cold fact, case closed?”

“Yes, exactly,” says the professor with an air of long suffering. “If we take Bechdel’s application of the theory to be true—”

“But why—no, _how_ —are you taking it to be true at all? Isn’t it circular logic to say that _because_ Bechdel is pulling from the theory in the way she interprets the world around her, the world around her necessarily aligns with the theory she assumes to be true in the first place? She’s making a claim about the world based on her subjective interpretation that’s based on the claim she’s making—you see my dilemma here?”

“That’s literary theory.”

“That’s _bullshit_ , pardon my French,” says Dean. He’s still got the charm dialed up to 100, and Sam feels himself impossibly drawn to him, even knowing that charisma is a front Dean wears like a costume to interact with the world without revealing any of his true self to it. Sam never claimed to be immune to his brother even when he knows exactly what he’s doing.

Louden smiles thinly. “What’s your name, sir? You’re not enrolled in this seminar, are you?”

“Naw, I’m just here visiting my brother. The name’s Dean Winchester, Professor,” he answers, and when he reaches over and claps Sam on the shoulder, Sam’s embarrassment is a dull roar behind the trumpet of his smug pride, forever and always Dean’s little brother.

In the afternoon is fiction writing workshop, which Sam skips. “Why?” Dean presses lightly, but Sam doesn’t reply. The truth is that he knows if he went he’d be required to share out his latest story within a small group that would inevitably include Dean, and he’s not ready for Dean to hear his writing—not now, and maybe not ever.

“I can think of a better use of my time with you,” says Sam instead, giving Dean a long once-over. Dean’s Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows.

When they make it back to the motel room, Sam gives him a long, lingering kiss and then starts fumbling with their belt buckles. Dean all but collapses onto the bed, pulling Sam with him to rest on top, between Dean’s legs. Sam’s ready to go _now_ , running a finger down the length of Dean’s erection, but Dean says, “Wait-wait-wait-wait, Sammy, wait. Get—in my duffel—lube and condoms…”

“Yeah, yeah,” says Sam, but he’s smiling. He presses a kiss to Dean’s neck and hops off the mattress, turning to Dean’s duffel and rummaging through it. Shampoo—razor—skin mags—

Wait. _Not_ skin mags. Sam rifles back to the magazines and skims through the titles. _Andromeda Spaceways_ , _Crimson Streets_ , _The Dark_ , _Occult Detective Quarterly_ …

“Dean,” says Sam, his voice wavering dangerously, “why do you have copies of all the journals I’ve been published in?”

Dean, still lying debauched on the bed, takes a few seconds to reply. “What? What do you mean, that you’ve been published in?”

“You know.”

“I don’t, actually. Don’t you’d think I’d know it if the stories I was reading were written by my little brother?”

“Apparently, you don’t,” Sam says furiously. “If you couldn’t figure out from the stories that _I’m_ Wedge Antilles, then you don’t know anything about me.”

“ _You’re_ Wedge Antilles? _You_ are?” Dean’s voice has risen a whole octave. “Sam, I thought he was some hunter freelancing as an author to make some extra cash. I had no idea Antilles was _you_ , I swear to god.”

“But how could you read everything I wrote and not _know_? What are you even doing reading literary journals? It’s not exactly your thing, is it?”

Dean, sitting up now, bows his head and twists his hands around and around each other in his lap, the tent in his underwear significantly flagging. “Gets lonely on the road,” he says quietly. “Reading, watching movies—it gives me something to do with myself. I follow a few journals, and that’s how I found Antilles. Thought he was great. Started following him wherever I could find him.”

“I can’t believe you didn’t figure out that it was my writing. I thought for sure that if you ever saw anything I’d written, you’d know. The cases—the themes of poverty and incest—?”

Dean cringes. “If you knew you were so identifiable by your writing, then why the hell’d you put all that in there? Do you _want_ everyone to know that you and I—that we—?”

“You say that like you’re disgusted by us,” says Sam without thinking.

“Aren’t you? I mean, you’re my baby brother. I damn well carried you out of the fire that killed Mom. I saw how fucked up your ideas about sex got after—after that thing in Nevada. I’m supposed to _protect_ you, and instead I’ve been _preying_ on you like some… some…”

Sam’s stomach feels like it drops about three feet below his body. “Oh, I’m sorry, I’ve been under the impression this whole time that you and I are in a relationship.”

Dean immediately adopts a look of incredulity and disgust. “I’m sorry, a _relationship_?”

“Not a monogamous one, or a consistent one, but yes, Dean, a relationship. That’s what you call it when two people share a deep bond and semi-regularly hook up with each other.”

“Well, then, maybe we should stop _hooking up_ ,” says Dean slowly.

Sam’s stomach drops another foot. “Because you’ve just been having sex with me to appease me this entire time. Because here I was totally in love with you and you didn’t really want any of the things that meant so much to me.”

“Sam—”

“No!” he says, folding his arms and looking away. This, here, is exactly the thing Sam’s been afraid of in the back of his mind for years—that Dean doesn’t really love him the way Sam loves Dean, that he’s only been playing a role because he’s scared of what Sam will do if he doesn’t get what he wants. What he needs. Well, Dean’s about to find out. “I want you to go.”

Dean won’t meet Sam’s eyes. “All right.”

“I don’t think you’re understanding me, Dean. I want you to go and never fucking come back.”

“What?” asks Dean. His voice is scarcely higher than a whisper.

“You’re right: this isn’t a relationship. Everything is always on _your_ terms, and you barely ever let me see you, and you even more rarely than that ever let me touch you. Well, I’m done with it. I need to accept that my life, my _real_ life, is the one I’ve been trying to build for myself here at Stanford, not the one wrapped up in whatever this is that I’ve been doing with you.”

Dean looks at him, now, and his eyes are round and—afraid? “I’ll be here if you change your mind, Sammy.”

Sam just smiles thinly and watches Dean awkwardly pull his trousers back on. He knows already, somewhere deep in his core, that he’s not going to change his mind—that he lost most of what was good about his relationship with Dean the night he left for Stanford, and that he’s not going to lose the rest of it and keep having hollow visits with Dean that ring with the reminder of everything there used to be between them, but isn’t anymore.

“Well, I guess this is goodbye, then,” says Dean once he’s fully clothed again.

Sam can only half believe what just happened—what this means. “Goodbye, Dean,” he says, and it lasts him a whole two and a half years.


End file.
